“The people have spoken and so it shall be.” With that post early on Sunday, Elon Musk announced that Alex Jones was back on X.
A few hours later, Jones’ posts were visible again. He promptly retweeted a post about his video game. He and his Infowars show had been permanently banned from the platform, then still known as Twitter, in 2018 for abusive behavior.
The poll
Musk had put the question to users on Saturday, asking whether Jones should be reinstated. Of those who responded, 70% voted yes.
Musk, who describes himself as a free speech absolutist, said the decision was about protecting those rights. When a user wrote that “permanent account bans are antithetical to free speech,” he answered, “I find it hard to disagree with this point.” He also predicted that Community Notes, X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking service, “will respond rapidly to any AJ post that needs correction.”
A reversal
Musk had said before that he would not let Jones return despite repeated calls to do so. Last year he pointed to the death of his first-born child and wrote, “I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”
Jones has repeatedly said on his show that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, never happened and was staged to tighten gun laws. Twenty children and six educators were killed there. Relatives of many of the victims sued Jones in Connecticut and Texas and won nearly $1.5 billion in judgments. In October, a judge ruled that he could not use bankruptcy protection to avoid paying more than $1.1 billon of that debt, as NBC News wrote it.
Family members testified at the trials that they were harassed and threatened by people who believed Jones, some of whom confronted the grieving relatives in person and accused them of being “crisis actors” whose children never existed. Jones is appealing the judgments, arguing that he did not get fair trials and that the First Amendment protected his speech.
Other reinstatements
After buying Twitter last year, Musk granted what he called “amnesty” to suspended accounts. He has since restored former President Donald Trump, and the rapper Ye, formerly Kanye West, after two suspensions over antisemitic posts last year. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, kicked off for violating the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policies, is back as well. Trump, banned for encouraging the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, has his own site, Truth Social, and has tweeted only once since being allowed back on X.
Sources
- Elon Musk restores X account of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones
- Elon Musk Restores Alex Jones X Account After Polling Users
